My father and his siblings, on the other hand, summed up
Ole’s behavior in two words: mean drunk. Although he was never violent to anyone
but his wives, and that always behind closed doors. And what hurt my father the
most about Ole stealing their TV repair money was not the act itself. Since he
didn’t hold money in high regard, my father felt sorry for anyone who succumbed
to the pathetic temptation to get their hands on more. What hurt was that if Ole
had ever said he needed money, my father would have emptied the till into his
hands, no questions asked.

When my father picked me up at the bus station on this visit,
I told him right off that I was sorry about what happened to Ole. He tightened
his lips and shook his head, not taking his eyes off the road. “Whatever he did,
he didn’t deserve that.” I hadn’t thought about our visit to Ole’s trailer for
years. I remembered how happy the two cousins were to see each other, the bright
five-year-old-boy grins grimace-like on those oddly matching hard faces. “Well,
look who’s here.” My father unloaded a case of beer from the back seat and a bag
of groceries. Ole growled and waved it away, my dad growled and waved it into
the trailer, where we all sat at a small built-in table in the little windowed
dining nook.

“This is my oldest girl,” my Dad had said. Ole gazed at me
shyly, adoringly. There was a bottle of cheap no-name cola waiting on the
table—for me—and I realized that my father had called ahead to arrange this
visit.

“I bet she’s good in school,” Ole offered. “Smart like her
mother.”

“Too smart for her own good,” my father answered, pretending
to glare at me.

“But she’s a good girl.”

“Good for nothing.”

They drank beer, I drank the flat soda, we ate the canned
chili my dad had brought, and it was clear that he had been coming to this
trailer to see his cousin all these years, not often, but not infrequently.
“Your mother doesn’t need to know about this,” he had said on our way back home.
I had tried my best to look insulted.

“Had you seen him recently?” I asked.

“Who?” My father looked at me, startled.

“Ole. Did you still go out to see him?”

My father’s eyes went back to the road. “Not since they got
back together. I should have.”

My father didn’t go to Ole’s funeral, and he didn’t go to the
trial. His sisters went, sitting through the entire two days, silent witnesses
who carried all those years of shared history with the man whose presence in the
courtroom had shrunk to the moment and manner of his horrifying death, framed by
a litany of spousal abuse. There was a complication: the woman’s grown son,
Ole’s stepson, had been in the trailer that morning when Ole was killed; in
fact, the shotgun belonged to him. According to my aunts, it was obvious to
everyone that the son had pulled the trigger. But the mother insisted that she
had done it, and she had her sad story of broken arms and noses and hospital
visits. While my aunts had a certain amount of sympathy for her, they were
amazed that, in the course of the two days, no one ever asked what they
considered to be the burning question: “Why did you go back and marry him again
if the first go around had been so bad?” That’s all they really wanted to know,
and so they came out of the proceedings feeling cheated.

It didn’t seem right to them that the wife whom Ole had
married twice was charged with manslaughter and sentenced to only 10 months in
prison (and would probably get out earlier on parole), but when I asked what
they thought she should have gotten, they had no recommendations. “She didn’t
even do it, she was just protecting her son,” my one aunt sighed. The other aunt
less charitably thought that mother and son had cooked up the idea together.
Neither of them had any trouble understanding why Ole’s stepson would hate him
so much, although shooting a man when he was asleep struck them as cowardly and
cancelled out their inclination to admire him for coming to his mother’s rescue.
Not that either of them would have used that word. As far as the aunts were
concerned, the woman had placed herself beyond victimization or rescue when she
went back to Ole. “If she left him once, she could have left him again,” said
the charitable aunt.

This
didn’t quite satisfy her sister. “If you put your hand on a hot stove once ….”
She made a “hsst” through her teeth, pantomiming the touching, the swift recoil
of the injured palm, but couldn’t think of a way to finish her analogy. We all
looked at the space where this phantom stove sat, dangerously hot, but no one
could think of a good way to finish it.